As many of you may know by now, a lot of our development has increased to have support for 1.10.2 and 1.11.2 and 1.12.2, with some API development towards Minecraft 1.13. As of this writing, the Sponge team has been planning on dropping support for 1.11.2 for a while, at the very least when API 7 for Minecraft 1.12.x is officially released. I am pleased to say that API 7 now has a release date of December 31st, 2017. What this will mean is that API 5 and 6 will no longer be supported, meaning Minecraft 1.10.2 and 1.11.2 will no longer be supported for API additions or bug fixes.

There is a lot of reasoning behind this, the largest reason is the direction of development and the time available to the development team towards resolving bugs to systems that have now been rewritten, refactored, improved, and replaced, since API 5 was introduced. Some of you may think “Well, why don’t you support 1.10.2 for a little bit longer? At least until 1.13 drops, or when larger modpacks are released for 1.12.2 or 1.13?” and my answer to that is simple: “It’s time to move on.” Bugs that are affected on older versions of Sponge are related to older systems (including the system formerly known as CauseTracker, now known as PhaseTracker) having certain limitations and stability requirements according to Minecraft’s development status. Diverting time and energy to support issues for older versions that are no longer in development, and requiring the team to attempt to replicate the issue, if necessary, on newer versions due to a small chance of a shared implementation in comparison, is considered a waste when it can be spent on improving the project in current developments.

While this may be a shock for some of you, it is a requirement and has always been said in the past that the Sponge project must always look forward, and not to the past. While it may have been probable to support 1.10.2 for a little while longer, I as a leader of the project, cannot ask more of the team to spend time and energy to support a version that has no future.

With that said, January 1st, 2018 will be the day that all issues related to 1.10.2 and 1.11.2 will be closed on the basis of being a no longer supported version, unless the issue is still reproducible on the latest version of either bleeding or stable release of SpongeForge/SpongeVanilla on Minecraft 1.12.2. If a sufficiently, decent, and tested PR for a bug fix is made by a non-core developer of the Sponge team, it would still be considered, even for 1.10.2; however, it is NOT to be expected that any bug fixes made for 1.12.2 will be back ported to 1.11.2 or 1.10.2.

I, personally, took a poll of my users in my support discord.
I’m sure you could see why this move could be relatively concerning for me. Moving completely to API 7 means abandoning over half of my user base, which really isn’t an option.

Which is why it’s going to be accepting of PR’s to fix bugs and what not, just not going to be actively developed. Since the API has been already in a frozen state, the implementation has been left behind by a majority of our development team. The goal is to keep people moving forward, and to continuously improve the current systems being worked on, rather than the systems that are no longer being worked on. As I said in the post, I simply cannot afford to keep the project stagnating on a single Minecraft version that had the last release a year and a half ago. I empathize with you on your user base, but it’s not as though the software will suddenly stop working, it will just not officially receive bug fixes being ported backwards from newer versions.

I totally understand the desire to move forward and keep up to date with Minecraft versions. You have no reason not to.
I certainly wasn’t expecting much of big feature overhauls or anything for 1.10.2, but just some sort of bug fixing and LTS type care, which seems to be what’s being offered here.

So this may be completely not feasible, but I figured I’d ask anyways. Assuming all the mods in a pack have 1.12.2 versions available, is it possible to upgrade a server on 1.10.2 to 1.12.2 without having to start from scratch? I know this is doable in vanilla, but being as modded is a totally different beast, I had no idea if this is even doable. We have a custom modpack for our server and I would be willing to move to 1.12 if it’s possible.

Hey! I am total noob at this, but love to hear you are upgrading to 1.12! A have a (stupid) question; because of new API, will plugins still work or will we have to update them? Thank you, keep up good work!

Most active Sponge plugin devs have got (or working on) versions for 1.12, so you will need to update them (as API 5/6 seems to differ quite greatly from 1.12).

@resqdiver1317 I highly recommend against keeping maps through versions if you’re using a modpack, never mind 2 main versions. You may get away with it if you’re only using a couple of mods, but I still wouldn’t recommend it.

Seeing as I’m replying here, just wanted to add my 2 cents… The Sponge team have done an amazing job so far, and are continuing to build an amazing community I am proud to be a member of. Here’s to another good year.

I personally agree with this decision and i hope it brings more time for merging/closing open prs , and finalizing Data API .
With api 8 I think that development team should focus more on events, as many issues are event related.
Sorry if I made a grammar mistake.
And thanks for your hard work

Are the issues with the event implementations or the API? As if it’s only the implementation there is no reason why it can’t be fixed on the current versions until the deadline, or even API7 after the deadline.

While this may be a shock for some of you, it is a requirement and has always been said in the past that the Sponge project must always look forward, and not to the past

Sponge upgrades too fast compared to the mod community. The main mods have not been updated to the higher version. Why did not Sponge develop and stabilize previous versions, instead of continuing to develop new versions and bypassing the old versions the unstable?

It’s not a question whether Sponge is upgrading too fast, it’s a question about maintaining said versions. If we had the development team large enough to maintain older software, then sure, we would likely keep 1.10.2 kicking around a little while longer, if only to fix bugs. As it stands currently, we simply don’t have the manpower to do so. One thing to remember about the project as a whole is that it is entirely volunteer driven; no one is paid or expected to continue their work on the project any more than they are willing.

As far as keeping 1.10.2 going, I have yet to see Forge even get updates except for maybe some major bug fixes or feature introductions after thorough testing from the community.

Even then, with the current situation, I’d say 1.12.2 will be fairly stable come the new year as the API is finalized (released before the start of 2018), and the entire team can focus on 1.12.2’s stability and bug fixes and implementation.

After 4 months of observation, I found mod 1.10.2 a small part has upgraded to 1.11.x and 1.12.x. Plug-in developers have stopped updating from API5 and have not updated to API 6+ 7, some new additions are available on ore, but most do not support API5 and 6.
I have a question: sponges are growing in the right direction?

I’m having difficulty understanding your message.
I have two servers loaded up with Sponge and API 7 plugins, one of which is heavily modded too. I haven’t had much difficulty finding API 7 compatible plugins, your mileage may vary. Some plugins have stopped development and some new ones have arrived. More importantly, Sponge implementations continue to be developed and refined; it’s up to plugin developers to keep up with the pace. Remember, the MC 1.13 release is not very far away. If you want plugins for older implementations (API5, 6), that’s going to become increasingly difficult.

I have two servers loaded up with Sponge and API 7 plugins, one of which is heavily modded too. I haven’t had much difficulty finding API 7 compatible plugins, your mileage may vary. Some plugins have stopped development and some new ones have arrived. More importantly, Sponge implementations continue to be developed and refined; it’s up to plugin developers to keep up with the pace. Remember, the MC 1.13 release is not very far away. If you want plugins for older implementations (API5, 6), that’s going to become increasingly difficult.

Maybe because English is not the main language in my country, the communication is not good. Simply because my early days with foam I thought sponges would grow in the direction that all plugins could be used for all versions without updating the sponge and it could incorporate mod and plugins, … Maybe from the beginning I have misunderstood the nature of the sponge: D
Sr